Many of us have been trained to hide or suppress negative feelings. They are unprofessional, unproductive, unnecessary, un-something. With wisdom, emotions may genuinely sting less. But achieving a Zen-like equanimity is death to an author. The less we feel, the worse our writing gets.
When I was younger, a friend and I had long discussions about soul in poetry. Why certain poetry felt technically sound, but utterly soulless. These days I have a horror of my own writing ending up that way. Beautiful, musical sentences that move no one.
No tears for the writer means no tears for the reader. But when your head is full of craft or plot, you’re just trying to get the words on the page fast enough. It’s hard to feel into it. The tears need to come before you write. Well before.
Maybe actors can make themselves feel things on demand (and do so multiple times while still remembering their lines) so there’s a world where I can learn to feel and think at the same time. But mostly I’m living either in my intellect or in my emotion, and when I’m in one of them it’s hard to remember the other even exists. (Nearly lost it at the dentist today — sugar crash, pain and bureaucracy came together all at once).
So what can you do? When the emotions hit, write. Let them in, give yourself a time constraint if you’re worried you’re going to wallow in misery for way too long, and let it all bleed onto the page. Now that I know I can recover from my lows quickly if I need to, I don’t have to do so right away.
I’m feeling into the little things these days. The one-star review on Goodreads. Irritation about a coworker. The look on the face of the guy who tried to pick me up when he realized I wasn’t even in his generation. Losing a bit of money (that would have once seemed large to me) because of travel shenanigans. These are passing trifles I’m used to brushing aside—but inquiring into them a bit helps me empathize with my various characters. A musician who screwed up a major performance. A mother irritated with a daughter wasting her potential. A forbidden romance. A woman who loses everything and has to build herself back up.
Sometimes these are character studies that never make it into the main plot, but they allow me to hear those characters’ voices in my head more clearly.
A friend posted a Rumi poem recently on IG that resonated, so I’ll end with the quote:
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.